Now Face to Face by Karleen Koen Read Free Book Online Page A

preserved, meat salted. Wasn’t it the same everywhere, the provisioning for winter? They’d provision for winter, then.
    Suddenly she saw the small wooden box among her ribbons and scarves. Thérèse tried to cover it with a scarf, but too late. Barbara knelt among the ribbons and opened it. Inside were plans and drawings, all that was left of the great house Roger had built in London, Devane House. And there was a pair of leather gloves—hers, kept by Roger in this box. Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life, her grandmother had read to her from the Bible. Roger, thought Barbara, you were my heart. How do I forget you?
    The attic door swung open. It was Hyacinthe, and from the expression upon his face, it was clear that excitement had come to First Curle.
    “Monsieur Bolling is here.”
    Bolling? The infamous Valentine Bolling?
    “A visitor, Thérèse,” Barbara said, suddenly as excited as Hyacinthe. “Our first visitor.” She put her hands to her hair. “Hyacinthe, you go and tell him that I will be with him soon. Beg his forgiveness and give him something to drink. What, Thérèse? What will we give him to drink, other than water from the well? Well, you go to the old kitchen slave and ask her where things are, Hyacinthe. Do what you can until I appear. Quickly, Thérèse, I don’t want to be rude to my first guest.”
    Even as the door was closing, Barbara was untying ties on her gown; in a moment she was in another—black, of course—and as Thérèse tied and buttoned it, she repinned her hair. In another moment, Thérèse had opened a jar of rouge and was patting it into Barbara’s cheeks. Another moment, and patches were found, those tiny, soft, dark shapes of silk, glued to the face with mastic, that were so fashionable in London.
    “By my brow and my mouth, only,” Barbara commanded. “Give me the rouge, and that piece of mirror. Hurry, hurry, Thérèse.”
    Deftly, too impatient to wait for Thérèse, she put rouge on her lips, combed her lashes and brows with lead combs, and went down the stairs to meet her first guest.
    How kind of him to call, she was thinking, and there was a sudden pang as Roger came into her mind, his manners so polished there was no imperfection to them. He would have called upon a new neighbor, would have welcomed her in every way. In the hall, she moved swiftly into the parlor, expecting to see a man sitting in one of her French chairs. There was no one, not even Hyacinthe. She could hear the dogs barking from behind a closed door, but when she opened the door to the other chamber across the hall, only the dogs looked back at her. She went to the window and looked out. No one there either.
    For a moment, she was as disappointed as a child. She went to the garden yard. No one. Well, she thought, he will soon show himself again, I’m sure. There was a pen and an inkpot and paper gathered for her by her obedient Hyacinthe, and she sat down and began to make a list of all she needed to do. If these colonials thought her grandmother’s precious chickens were going to roost at night in trees, they had another thought coming. “Chicken coop,” she wrote firmly, boldly, thinking suddenly that she’d make a notebook for her grandmother about the plantation. It was her dogs barking, a good half hour later, that made her raise her head and go to the window again.
    Two men had ridden up under the pines. The older was Bolling, she guessed, and the younger Klaus Von Rothbach, the nephew by marriage. Greatly excited to have guests, she touched her hair, smoothed the front of her gown, and walked down the steps into the yard—but her dogs ran out ahead of her and charged at the stallion upon which Bolling sat.
    The stallion pawed the ground and tried to rear, so that Bolling had to work to keep himself in the saddle. Barbara managed to call the pugs off, to run with them back into the house and close them away into a chamber. Awful, she thought, awful